


Be Your Scars

by failsafe



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Coping, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Team Dynamics, ToT: Treat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 04:17:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12573504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: Artemis is recruited to try and reactivate Nightwing because they have something in common.





	Be Your Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salvadore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvadore/gifts).



> I really did try to keep this not to sad per your DNWs. I really wanted to do something based on your prompt that Dick and Artemis are the only non-metahumans on the team. There is referenced past-Artemis/Wally, per canon. I tried to leave this open-ended for shippy vibes in other directions, too, but it's up to your eye. Hope you enjoy!

When Kaldur approaches Artemis while she sits on a bed in the infirmary at the Watchtower, she looks up to the level of his eyes. She holds his gaze for a moment, but when his expression changes and he starts to speak, she looks back down again. Paper crinkles beneath her – the sterile, unsteady sound of a temporary stay on one of these beds. She's just making a pit-stop, treating a few-days-old wound on her leg. She is cleaning it again, and it has all but stopped stinging. 

“Artemis,” Kaldur says, her name whispered as if it is still some secret only the two of them must know – as if they are still embedded among enemies. 

“Right here,” she says. They are alone in the room, so she doesn't correct him about her codename. She has almost gotten tired of doing it. Maybe she should just let them call her 'Artemis' all the time, allow all her selves to be one and the same. It's still impossible, though, because she knows that the moment she allows that, she will start hoping. Whether they call them miracles or perversions of physics – and she knows which one _he_ would – they have seen many impossible, unbelievable, incredible things happen. It is hell knowing that death does not have to be the end, does not have to be permanent, but that she must believe that it is. 

In this room, alone with Kaldur – alone with any one of them who were there from the start – it doesn't matter anyway. Alone with them, she can't help what she hopes. She can't do a damn thing about the fact that Wally is as much a part of this, whatever  _ this _ is, was, with  _ the Team _ she had known from the start, as he ever was. She just has to grit her teeth and bear it. She suddenly wishes that the cut on her leg would sting again. At least it would distract her. 

“Have I interrupted anything?” Kaldur asks. 

“I think you can see what I'm doing,” Artemis replies, voice a little low and displeased to draw back from the way he must be able to read her face. He can tell when she's thinking. She hates it, but for a while it had been how they had survived. 

“Yes,” Kaldur replies, hesitating but pressing on after a moment. “Artemis, I came to talk to you about something... private.” He finds something to do with his hands on a nearby counter, curiously inspecting stainless steel. 

Artemis's heart skips a beat and drops down toward her stomach. She never flinches. She hopes – again – that no one is going to ask her anything she cannot possibly answer. Not yet. She thinks that saying 'not ever,' would make her eat her words and betray the kind of person she is on her own, but for now it's still true. 

“What is it?” she asks, words fast and tone a little less controlled. Her hands are as steady as ever while she carefully begins to redress the wound. 

“We have need of a team—” Kaldur says. She can tell he isn't finished, but the way she looks at him must have stopped him. 

“We _have_ a team,” Artemis points out, more emphatically than she means to. 

“It's not the Justice League or the regular undercover team that we need,” he says. “It's something in-between. I need a small team that I can trust. That I... know.” 

Artemis frowns, wondering why he pauses on that word. 

“You know all of us. And you know me,” she says, perhaps willfully oblivious, but she had learned from the best. “And you know that if you need someone, I'm there,” she adds. 

“I know that,” Kaldur says, smiling softly. She hates the way it's sad around the edges, but she can't say she blames him. Hers probably still is, too. “Thank you,” he says. “But I was hoping you could do something for me first.” She almost interjects with a question, but as smoothly and calmly as Kaldur tends to speak, he presses onward before she can say anything. “I was hoping you could go and try to reactivate Nightwing.” 

Another drop in her stomach.

\- - - 

She had a lot of questions. She'd had several protests. She had known she was being the most outwardly calm, internally kicking-and-screaming she had been in a while. When Bart had come to ask her something, his uniform had nearly made the kicking-and-screaming go from inside to outside, and the look in her eyes had sent him scampering away. 

But Kaldur needed her to do it, so there was really no question. 

Well, there had been one. 

“Why me?” she had asked. “You're the Team leader he knew. You still are. You're who he left in charge.” 

More than a simple question, but it still counted as one question. When Kaldur had an answer ready for her, it sealed her fate and meant she had drawn the short straw without ever knowing she had been playing the game. 

“You have something in common that everyone else lacked,” Kaldur had said. 

Another question with a sinking feeling of resignation to her task had come up. 

“... Wally?” she had managed to ask. The desperate, terrible hope and dread that came with saying his name, especially in the form of a question, still felt too fresh and painful, like a raw nerve. 

Kaldur's eyes opened wider. He looked at her, and she could tell that he had taken such a deep breath that even his gills had worked uselessly at the air. 

“I... actually meant your unique position of having been the only pair of non-metahumans on the Team,” Kaldur had responded. Artemis remembered the way her body had turned a dark shade of red from her face down her neck. 

And so, she is on her way to see Dick Grayson. Kaldur had used his codename throughout their conversation about doing this, about why now, about why her, and Artemis only just now realizes it. She wonders why, and for some reason it bothers her a little. Still, she comes upon his apartment building in civilian clothes, makes her way to the right unit, and knocks. 

\- - - 

“I can't do it,” Dick concludes. He has heard her out, but his answer is the same as when he had invited her in and heard her first quick, rushed attempt to recruit him back. 

“What,” Artemis asks, not quite able to make it a sincere question. She feels like she has wasted her breath, and the back of her neck prickles with heat and fury. She restrains herself, because she can see the tired, resigned look in his eyes while he stares down at the little kitchen bar in his apartment. She sits across from him and glowers anyway. 

“I didn't just leave lightly, Artemis,” he says. He is pleading with her to understand, but she won't. She refuses. 

“Yes, you did,” she says. She has never said it before. They have never really talked about it. She has never told him and never asked him. She has never even mentioned the way he left so soon after the funeral, hardly bothering to say goodbye. She knows why he had avoided a real explanation and a real goodbye with her in particular, but it still hurts. It still makes her angry. 

“Artemis, I shouldn't have ever asked you to come back,” Dick says. 

It's almost like he is trying to make her angry, but Artemis breathes in a way that reminds her of cartoons of cornered bulls. She exhales and tightens her hand's grip a little. 

“Don't do that,” she warns. “Don't make it sound like this is the same thing or that—”

“No, it's not.”

“Then what?” 

“I had to go. I had to leave it behind because on the very first day, that very first mission, before we ever met you, it was me and him. Him and me. We went together because it was... what we did, back then. He was my first friend, and my decisions... every day from then until... the day I got him killed, brought him there. Including every decision I ever made about you. For you. I can't... do it again,” he insists. 

Artemis feels stupid. She shouldn't, and she bristles against it. She won't feel stupid for long, but hearing it makes her pulse pound in her ears with embarrassment that filters through the anger she had been feeling. She stares at him like he had no right to correct her. She doesn't have any idea why it had never occurred to her, what he had actually been thinking, with as much as she had wondered, balked, and hated during those first few weeks when she had come back and he had left in the wake of the same loss. 

She sighs after a while. She relaxes her knuckles and reaches across the kitchen bar. She raps her half-uncoiled knuckles lightly against his forearm. The bone and skin seem familiar and strange at once. 

“Hey,” she scolds him lightly. “I made my own decision. I jumped at it, remember? The thing is... I missed it. I missed the danger and the close calls and the making a difference. Wally... didn't. He didn't miss it because he knew that his meta-abilities were wearing down, wearing off, and it took his confidence with it. About that anyway,” she says with a crooked ghost of a smile. “I... used to tell him that you and I could do it. So could he. I was... wrong, and I live with that every day. I still do this, though. I have to now.” 

“You don't... _have_ to. He wouldn't have... he'd have wanted you safe,” Dick admits to himself, “but he wouldn't have wanted you to push yourself to do this anyway, if it's not... what you want. Even if he would have accepted it in the long run.” 

“Wally didn't _let_ me do anything,” Artemis says, saying one thing but meaning another. 

“I know,” Dick says, understanding without hesitation. She sees him try to smirk, too, but he won't look her in the eye while he does it. 

“But I'm not letting you just give up. He wouldn't either. You were born for it,” she says. 

“I was born into it,” Dick says. She has a vague idea of what he means. It summons up memories of her own life – what her own father had molded her into, so early, and without asking, but she doesn't quite ask him if he means the same. 

“So was I, then. It's what we've got,” she insists. “So come on. Remember that word you made up?” 

 


End file.
